Severe rainfall events in Northwestern Peru (visualization of scattered meteorological data)

The ordinarily arid climate of coastal Peru is disturbed every few years by a phenomenon called El Nino, characterized by a warming in the Pacific Ocean. Severe rainstorms are one of the consequences of El Nino, which cause great damage. An examination of daily data from 66 rainfall stations in the Chiura-Piura region of northwestern Peru from late 1982 through mid-1983 (associated with an El Nino episode) yields information on the mesoscale structure of these storms. These observational data are typical of a class that are scattered at irregular locations in two dimensions. The use of continuous realization techniques for qualitative visualization (e.g., surface deformation or contouring) requires an intermediate step to define a topological relationship between the locations of data to form a mesh structure. Several common methods are considered, and the results of their application to the study of the rainfall events are analyzed.<<ETX>>

[1]  W. H. Quinn,et al.  HISTORICAL TRENDS AND STATISTICS OF THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION, EL NINO, AND INDONESIAN DROUGHTS , 1978 .

[2]  Hiroshi Akima,et al.  A Method of Bivariate Interpolation and Smooth Surface Fitting for Irregularly Distributed Data Points , 1978, TOMS.

[3]  R. L. Hardy.  Multiquadric equations of topography and other irregular surfaces , 1971 .

[4]  Walter H. F. Smith,et al.  Gridding with continuous curvature splines in tension , 1990 .

[5]  Meteorology: Anomalous El Niño of 1982–83 , 1983, Nature.

[6]  P. Alfeld.  Scattered data interpolation in three or more variables , 1989 .

[7]  E. Rasmusson,et al.  El Nio and Variations in Climate , 1985 .

[8]  R. A. Scofield,et al.  Characteristics of extreme rainfall events in northwestern Peru during the 1982–1983 El Niño period , 1987 .

[9]  Kevin P. McAuliffe,et al.  An architecture for a scientific visualization system , 1992, Proceedings Visualization '92.

[10]  D. Shepard.  A two-dimensional interpolation function for irregularly-spaced data , 1968, ACM National Conference.

[11]  Gregory M. Nielson,et al.  Scattered data modeling , 1993, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[12]  Gerardo M. E. Perillo,et al.  An interpolation method for estuarine and oceanographic data , 1991 .

[13]  Pia R. Pfluger,et al.  Smooth interpolation to scattered data by bivariate piecewise polynomials of odd degree , 1990, Comput. Aided Geom. Des..

[14]  G. Ramstein.  An interpolation method for stochastic Models , 1990, Eurographics.

[15]  Robert J. Renka,et al.  Multivariate interpolation of large sets of scattered data , 1988, TOMS.

[16]  Michael E. Agishtein,et al.  Smooth surface reconstruction from scattered data points , 1991, Comput. Graph..